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September 12, 2003

small worlds @04:57 PM

a current project at columbia is testing the six degrees of separaton phenomenon / hypothesis. Most current versions of network theory suggest that Milgram's inital hypothesis, while being amazingly accurate and correct in the majority of cases, probably cannot be applied to the entire world, although it seems as though 10 links may do it. That's what this study is testing -- trying to find an average number of links between random people. Duncan Watts, who co-authored a definitive small-worlds theory while at Cornell, is leading the research. The results should be interesting, and I encourage everyone to try it out.

You login, and are immediately given a target contact, who you try and reach through a series of emails, each email hypothetically getting 'closer' to the target. My target is Mary Bowen, a Welder who lives in Tenn. I forwarded the message to tripp, because he lived in the east. Although since Mary lived in Michigan for a while, I realize now I should have sent it to my friend who grew up in Ann Arbor. This is much like the original experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram. Milgram sent out letters to randomly chosen people in Kansas and Nebraska, asking them to forward the letter to a stockbroker friend of his who was living in Boston. He did not give them the address. To forward the letter, he asked them to send the letter to someone who would be, like in the Watts experiment, closer, either socially or geographically, to the stockbroker. Milgram found that most of the letters reached his friend in six mailings or less -- hence the term 'six degrees of separation.'

http://smallworld.columbia.edu/

posted by will | comments (1) | permalink

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I did this last spring (the first "round") and posted the NYTimes article on the main blog August 12th. I did it twice: The first, to a worker in the tech sector in Punjab was completed in five steps -- amazing! The second, to a policeman in western australia, died on the vine at the third, unforwarded email.
I'm fascinated by this and interested to how you might integrate this interest into your work.

Posted by: peggy at September 22, 2003 09:10 PM